Submission To "Annales de la Foundation Louis de Broglie"

Author's summary

My first insight into a classical unified field theory occurred in August of 1999 using quaternion potentials. In the spring of 2000, an explicit road to a metric similar to, but not identical with, the Schwarzschild metric of general relativity was worked out. Physicists do not use quaternions in their daily work. A goal in 2001 was to repeat the work using the stand tool set of scalars, vectors, and tensors. It was this representation of the work I sought to publish.

The "Annales de la Foundation Louis de Broglie"'s call for papers was dedicated to new perspectives on the Maxwell equations. This focus was consistent with the thesis of my work, which asserts that the Maxwell equations do not completely describe four dimensional wave phenomena.

In order to justify a search based on what looks like a very common and thus uninteresting equation (the 4D wave equation), a paper on quantizing the radiation field was cited at the start. In the paper, four modes of emission for an electromagnetic field are discussed. Only the two transverse modes are used by electrodynamics. There are therefore two modes whose role in Nature need to be explained. This was the starting point for the subsequent classical presentation.

The first referee saw it differently. The cited paper was a classic of quantum field theory. He expected my paper to quantize the scalar gravitational photons. Since no attempt was made, he considered the paper insufficient for publication.

Based on discussions with a friend who has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, the logic of the proposal has been significantly shifted since the submission. The second referee did not follow the presentation, seeing instead a collection of arbitrary assumptions. A cleaner statement of the hypothesis might have shown how everything flowed from one starting point.

The editor wanted to know why the force of gravity was unidirectional, unlike electromagnetism. The gravitational field is the symmetric part of a second rank tensor, unlike the electric field which is the antisymmetric part. The symmetric part does not change under either time or spatial inversion, unlike the antisymmetric part. The editor found this observation insufficient, concurring with both reviewers that the paper should not be accepted for publication. He offered to see it published in an electronic journal which is not subject to peer review.

The offer was declined because the peer review process did what it was deigned to do: either trumpet new work or send it back for retooling. This paper fell into the latter class. All references to quantum mechanics have been removed since the results are all classical. A new classical justification was a direct result of having to remove the quantum motivation. That new perspective made the submission worth while. I will have to see how a live person reacts to the idea. If the feedback is positive, it will form the basis of a rewrite to be submitted in a few months to another peer review journal.


doug sweetser